如何產生索引卡及利用 word 索引輔助功能
How
do I generate an index in Word?
(我如何在word產生索引)
|
目次
Making an Index
Planning the Job , 12 pt
Types of Index(索引類型?) , 12 pt
Mark-up Indexes (標註索引), 12 pt
Indexing Made Easy (7步), 12 pt
Page Number Conflation, 14pt
See! It isn't that hard, 14pt
The
Microsoft Word Help suggests that you can automatically generate an
index. Sorry, but you can't (the "result" looks like
an index, but the reader can't use it). You canautomatically
mark index entries: however, the amount of work required to edit the
result into a useable index is usually double the effort required to
manually mark the index entries one-by-one.
Instead
of automatically generating something that is not useable, the reader
would far prefer you to express the document electronically and
provide a free text search. A free text search serves the reader's
needs far better than a badly-constructed index, and the search
engines available these days are smart enough to look for what the
reader“wanted” rather than what he or she “asked
for”.
Making
an Index
An
experienced technical writer wrote this article. As a technical
writer, I produce long documents running to thousands of pages of
technical material. Indexes are part of my game. I can't tell you how
to produce one automatically, but I can tell you how to
produce one easily!
Before
1990-ish, Indexing was a profession of its own; in addition to an
Author and an Editor, a large book had an Indexer. Even today, if you
are making a book such as a medical encyclopedia that is going to
remain in print for many years, it is simply stupid not to
use a professional indexer. Really good indexes are an even mix of
science and art form, and the quality improvement a professional
makes is well worth paying for. Of course, few of us these days work
on publications that are going to last long enough to justify this
effort. And even fewer of us have the time to produce such an index.
If you do have the time, obtain a copy of “Indexing, The
Art of” by G. Norman Knight (Allen & Unwin, ISBN
0-04-029002-6). Norman Knight is a former President of The
Society of Indexers, and his book is simple and charming. Reading it,
you will soon realize that indexing is not difficult; it simply takes
attention to detail and patience.
Planning
the Job , 12 pt
Word
has one of the nicest and most powerful index generators around built
right in, so you have all the tools you are going to need. You need
to allow a week per 500 pages to generate an index in a technical
book. Technical publications are fairly “information dense”.
Scholarly monographs and the like are usually quicker to index.
Types
of Index(索引類型?) , 12 pt
In
the old days (say, 1995 or thereabouts!) indexes were all produced by
the “shoebox” method. They literally used a shoebox into
which they inserted index cards: three-inch by five-inch cards upon
which they wrote the index term and its page number. The Indexer
would sit with a large pile of “galley proofs”, single-page
images as they were returned from the typesetter, and go through each
one line-by-line seeking and recording the index terms. At the
finish, they typed the index out with its page numbers and sent it
off to the typesetter for publication. There is a software tool
specially built for indexing that emulates this process exactly. I
tell you this simply because, in certain circumstances, this method
is still the best today. If your document is going
to be published from a different computer to the one it is being
created on, and that machine cannot interpret Microsoft Word XE tags,
and you do not know what the page numbers are yet because the other
machine is going to do the pagination, then use the shoebox method! (shoebox 鞋盒，傳統作法，跨平台)
Word
will do two forms of index: The Concordance Index and
the Mark-up Index. It will also do something half-way
in-between, using its “Mark All” command.
Mark-up
Indexes (標註索引), 12 pt
A
Mark-up index is the method I recommend.
It's quick, accurate, easy to understand, and easy to correct.
With a little care in the planning, it normally results in a very
useable index.
As
the term implies, you produce a mark-up index by embedding
mark-up “tags” in the Word document. Word automatically
looks up the page numbers at Print time and generates and formats the
index for you. Study the help topic “Create an index” and
all its sub-topics. This is the way I recommend. It's the way
that all good writers create an index these days. Mark by mark, page
by page! It is explained in detail below.
Concordance
Indexes ,
10
pt
I
implore you not to waste your time with a Concordance Index for most
publications. It results in a huge pile of rubbish that is of very
little use to the reader. And it takes nearly as long to make as it
does to generate an index properly. The Concordance Index is a
hangover from the past when people were desperately hoping to produce
an “automatic index” to reduce the labor. Every major
word-processor will do them, and no professional writer or editor
would, these days, permit one.
To
make a Concordance index you make up a table of all the terms you
want Word to find in one column, and the index entry you want to see
for each term in the other. For more information, see “Create
a concordance file” in the Word help file. But the end result
is that you have every term indexed at EVERY place it occurs. Most of
the mentions of a term in a book are simply passing references: what
the reader wants to see in the index is only one page
number; the one that contains the main topic for the term. If you
send them on a wild goose chase to 20 other places first, they will
think most unkindly of you.
The
concordance mechanism does have its place: It can often be used
to good effect in Reference Books such as Programming Reference
Manuals, where each command or function is referred to only in a
small section of the text, then rarely mentioned anywhere else in the
book.
For
the truly adventurous… ,
10
pt
Technical
writers and other folk who publish seriously-huge documents in HTML
may want to spend a little time learning about Concordance Indexes.
In conjunction with VBA, a concordance index is a great way to
automatically generate hyperlinks in your document. You tag
every mention of each term with the concordance indexing mechanism,
then use VBA to change the tags into hyperlink tags.
Indexing
Made Easy (7步) , 12 pt
Here
are some worthwhile hints I can give you so you do not go mad during
the process:
| 1. |
Print
a copy of the book and go through it with a highlighter, marking
the items you would like to see in the index. If you are not the
subject-matter expert, get someone who is expert in the subject to
do this for you (the process is massively easier if you understand
the subject well). Mark only places where the reader will get
information about each item. For example, if you want to
include “installation procedure”, you would mark “Follow
the procedure below to install...” in Chapter 1, you would
not mark “if you completed the installation
procedure...” in Chapter 5. The first is what the reader
would expect to see when he looks up 'Installation Procedure'. The
second might cause the reader to come and look you up {grin}. |
| 2. |
Make
some design decisions before you start putting codes in the file.
The most important are:
|
How
many levels of entry are you going to allow? If it is more than
three, I will personally come and shoot you! Such an Index is
both unusable and unmaintainable {grin}. |
|
Are
you going to reverse the terms? “Indexing, the art
of” or “The art of Indexing”? Normally do the
former, but whichever you select, you must do it for every
entry |
|
How
will you treat numbers? All as if they were spelled out; or all
up the front above the “A”s? In technical books, do
the second, but whichever you do, you must do it for every
number. |
|
Will
you use “see” references to condense the index?
My vote in modern times is: “No, don't bother”.
“See” references
mean the reader finds the index entry, then has to go find
another index entry before they can find the page. It annoys
your reader, it doesn't save much paper, and these days paper
is not very expensive. |
|
Will
you “put the Table of Contents in the Index”? Debate
rages in the more pedantic Indexing circles about this one.
The
pedants (sorry, “purists”) say you should not include
in the index terms that are contained in headings in the table
of contents. I say: “Of course you should”.
Research shows that some people (about 35 pct) look in Tables
of Contents, some people (about 60 pct) look in Indexes. Few
readers these days have a clear picture of the conceptual
difference between them, and each reader will secretly thank
you if he can find what he wants in both places. I always
include an index entry for every heading in the book. So shoot
me! |
|
Sort
order: Word-by-word or “letter-by-letter”? By default,
Word does the former. Purists like the latter: I don't; I can
never find anything in such an index, and most readers hate it.
So shoot me again! To produce a letter-by-letter sort, you have
to place the generated index in a two-column table (page
numbers in one column, text in the other). Then copy the
text column, remove the spaces from it with Find/Replace, then
shift that column to all upper-case and sort by it. Then remove
the uppercase column and turn the table back into text. |
|
Avoid
the classic hilarity of putting “the book” in the
Index. If you are writing a book called “All About
Word” you may get sued for a laughter-based injury if
you include “Word” as a term in the index. But
for your own amusement, have a look in the indexes
(not “indices”!) of a few cheap-and-nasty technical
manuals such as are often produced in-house as training
manuals. You will be surprised how often you see this classic
faux pas. And you may immediately become suspicious that you
are looking at an automatically generated index! |
|
3.
|
Now
run through and tag the entries you have highlighted, according to
the instructions in the help topic “Mark index entries”.
Unfortunately, if you have made a few indexes, you will know how
to do this, and if you haven't, your first attempt will contain
errors. Sorry: I had to go through this too {grin}.
I
will give you a hint that will save you a bit of time (quite a
lot, actually...) Do not put in the subentries at
this stage. By that I mean tag each item as a main term.
If the entry does belong as a subentry, you will find that you can
add the main term to the tag more simply on your second pass.
A
Word About Tagging:
Word's
index tags are both case-sensitive and "space-sensitive".
"Installing" and "installing" are not the same
thing: each will appear under its own heading.
"Administration" and " Administration" are not
the same thing: one will sort right at the top of the index.
See? When you are debugging "entries out of sequence"
you sometimes have to look extremely closely to ensure that the
tags really do match exactly.
To
enter an index tag in a heading, ensure that your headings are
formatted by styles, and do not apply any formatting overrides to
the heading. If you apply direct formatting to the headings that
contain index tags, the direct formatting will be copied through
to your Index.
A
colon : and a semicolon ; are not the same thing! You use
colons to divide the levels of sub-entry in your index tags.
When you are in a hurry, it is too easy to type the un-shifted
character (the semi-colon) instead of the shifted character (the
full colon) in the tag. If you do, you will get some very
weird errors in your generated index. There's no easy way to
find these, but the semi-colon will appear in the index. If
you have strange things happening (items that do not appear under
their correct entries or sub-entries) try searching your generated
index for semi-colons. If you find any, at least you know
"what" is wrong: finding the tag that produced the
problem is a real chore (it will not be on the page in the
index...). Try this: Reveal your hidden text (so you
can see your XE tags) then search for a semi-colon with the font
format hidden text. If you find any, chances are they
are in your bad index tags.
|
4.
|
Now
generate the index. Ignore the formatting at this stage; just
print it. Leave it as a single column for ease of reference. If
you have a big screen, you can open a second window into the
document and look at the index that way (see the Window menu) but
for most, it's easier to print the first result.
|
5.
|
Now
sit down with a colored pen or pencil (you can't see blue or black
against black type...) and edit the index.
|
Mark
all the terms that should become sub-entries, and show the term
they should be sub-entries of. |
|
Now
run down it, and for each term, ask yourself “What else
could the reader possibly call this?” Add an entry for
each. |
|
Run
down it again, and for each term, ask yourself “Is there
anything else the reader would need to know about when looking
this up?” Add a “See also” for each one
you find. |
|
6.
|
Go
through and edit the tags in the file to implement the changes you
have identified.
You
can find index tags easily by using the Browse buttons on your
vertical scroll bar (see “Browse to the next or previous
page, table, or other item” in the help).
In
later versions of Word (2002 and above) you can use Ctrl +
G to bring up the "Go To" dialog.
Set "Go to what?" to "Field".
Set the Enter field name box to "XE".
Click Next, then Close. Your
"Previous" and "Next" browse buttons (at the
extreme bottom right corner of the Word window, under the vertical
scroll bar) will now go to the next or previous index entry fields
on each click, until you change to something else.
If
you use Find, or Browse by Find, you can
specify ^d XE as your Find string
to find only index tags.
If
you know exactly what the text of the tag is, you can
use ^d XE "tag text string" to
find exactly that tag. However, this requires you to work
out exactly what the tag content will be, and that's not easy
three levels down in an Index.
So
I prefer to use Ctrl + G, Page Number (from the
index), then Ctrl + F, ^d (to find the next XE
tag. Then keep hitting Browse Next to find
the tag you want.
|
7.
|
Now
regenerate your index. (Click in it and press F9). You
can now change it to double-column if you wish. You format an
index by using Format>Style to change the styles Index 1
through Index 9. Each style controls the formatting of one level
of entry.
|
Page Number Conflation(區間頁碼), 14pt
Page
number conflation is where only the first and last page numbers
appear for a topic. In the index you see 88 - 95 instead of 88,
89, 90... --頁碼範圍, 88 - 95。建議只標註第一頁。
I
am very tempted to say "don't bother"! Tag the first
instance of each term. If your reader does not have the brains
to see that the information on a topic continues for several pages,
they should be kept away from your book in case they hurt
themselves... However, if you absolutely must conflate, this is
the way to do it:
-
Place
a bookmark around all of the pages you want to conflate. 頁數範圍建立書籤
-
Then
place the name of the bookmark in the XE tag, Word will generate a
conflated page reference for you.
See! It isn't that hard, 14pt
There!
That's the way I do it. If you trust me and do it that way, you will
find out why I do it that way. If you don't trust me and do it
another way, you will find out why much sooner {grin}.
